Kubuntu doesn't get to X or KDE; leaves me at BusyBox & ash

[CayleyGraph]

Hello.

I recently switched to Kubuntu from a Gentoo installation after getting fed up with all the work it took to make Gentoo work, and deciding that regular Ubuntu's interface wasn't working for me. I managed to cobble together a working system with Kubuntu that lasted a few months.

Recently, after leaving my desktop on without rebooting it for a few weeks, I had to reboot it again. After booting up and selecting the OS in GRUB, Kubuntu goes to a loading screen with a much lower resolution than the fancy one that I had been seeing before. After the four dots in the animation dissappear, the process stops at BusyBox and ash.

Using a SystemRescueCd, I was able to find that one of my hard drives had an error on it. Fortunately, I was also able to repair the error using gparted on the CD. However, I still can't get to a KDE session. I don't know how to go about fixing errors like this in a Kubuntu distribution, either.

Can anyone give me advice on how to diagnose the problem? I doubt I've given enough information to figure out how to fix the problem, but hopefully somebody knows of a CD to download & boot from, along with advice for fixing/reinstalling the environment. Until I hear from you, I'm going to try downloading & running the installation CD (I can't find my old install CD) and seeing if that either has scripts for fixing an installation, or else if reinstalling will fix the problem.

Thank you for your time.

[vinnywright]

for starters , how many hard drives do you have in the box , what type of error was fixed and how did gparted "fix"it , and was the hard drive with the errors the one your install was on?

VINNY

[CayleyGraph]

for starters , how many hard drives do you have in the box , what type of error was fixed and how did gparted "fix"it , and was the hard drive with the errors the one your install was on?

VINNY

Thank you for your prompt reply.

I have five hard drive in the box.

I did not have the presence of mind to record the error, nor the message that was displayed after "fixing" the error. All I can tell you is that gparted no longer lists an error message when I scan the drive. The program it uses to scan the drive is e2fsk, with the options -f -y -v if that helps.

The hard drive with the errors was indeed the one where I installed Kubuntu, although it was a different partition.

Thank you for trying to help, despite the paucity of information I can supply.

[vinnywright]

it may be easier to just reinstall ,,,, if you have files you need off the installation make a new (you dont have the old one right ) live cd/usb boot it up to a live session and copy them to a different partition/drive first.

or if you feel adventurous we can try to save it ,,, do you still get grub , if so see if you can boot to recovery mode or not if you can post back.

VINNY

[CayleyGraph]

it may be easier to just reinstall ,,,, if you have files you need off the installation make a new (you dont have the old one right ) live cd/usb boot it up to a live session and copy them to a different partition/drive first.

or if you feel adventurous we can try to save it ,,, do you still get grub , if so see if you can boot to recovery mode or not if you can post back.

VINNY

Thanks again for your help.

GRUB actually comes up fine; I end up at BusyBox whether I pick the regular Kubuntu kernel or the recovery mode option, though. I also have old Kubuntu kernels that failed to work as well. Hopefully it's a problem with one of the other supporting packages, and not a hardware problem.

Is there a difference between what the two modes are supposed to do? The only difference I see is that recovery mode shows me the device messages like Gentoo did as it boots, whereas the regular mode goes to the pixellated version of the Kubuntu loading screen. I actually prefer the version with all the messages over the fancy loading screen version, because I feel like I'm getting more information with the messages (even though I don't know enough to understand the information).

[vinnywright]

recovery boots (or is supposed to) into a root shell with full admin privileges , you can get the text boot up (without the pretty boot splash) by pressing the "e" key wile in grub befor it starts to boot and you will enter edit mode , then move the curser with the arrow keys and back space out the "quiet splash" from the "linux" line , then press ctrl+x to boot your temporary edit .

do this and see where it gives up and drops you to busy box .

VINNY

[jlittle]

... I actually prefer the version with all the messages over the fancy loading screen version, because I feel like I'm getting more information with the messages...

At least two posters here agree. When you've got your system back, edit /etc/default/grub and remove "quiet splash" from the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX and GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT settings, and sudo update-grub.

Regards, John Little

[kubicle]

Dropping to busybox is commonly a problem with disk/filesystem, fstab or initramfs...usually not being able to mount root filesystem (rarely it can also be a kernel problem, but since older kernels also won't boot, I'd rule that out).

I'd go with vinny's suggestion first to troubleshoot, boot into recovery (or edit regular boot in grub to remove "quiet splash" for a one time text boot) to see if any error messages present themselves)

[CayleyGraph]

Thanks for all your assistance.

I ran into some urgent deadlines with my work, and decided to simply go ahead and reinstall Kubuntu as a workaround. The installation was successful, but because of the deadlines, I forgot to update this thread. My apologies for leaving this unresolved.